I saw this painting last year while visiting Amsterdam’s Hermitage museum, as part of their Dutch Masters exhibition, and I was drawn to its unique and unusual content, showing animals giving a hunter and his dogs a taste of their own medicine.
This oil painting, painted crica 1647, contains 14 panels within the painting of a range of subjects. 12 of the panels show aspects of hunter’s lives, such as setting traps, and in the top right hand corner a painting depicting the myth of Diana and the hunter Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and killed by his own hunting dogs after accidentally seeing Diana while she bathed.
Paulus Potter was born in 1625 in Enkhuizen, Northern Netherlands. He specialised in oil paintings of animals within landscapes. He produced around 100 paintings in his short lifetime, as he died at only 28 of tuberculosis, working continuously.
His most famous painting, the life-size “The Young Bull” (circa 1647) has been admired as an example of early Romanticism. Indeed, it would seem that this observation could also be applied to ‘The Hunter’s Punishment’ because of the painting’s focus on the intense emotion and individualism of the subjects of the painting’s centre two frames.
The painting creates a clear contrast through the differing styles of the two intense, Romantic centre images and the twelve traditional, Enlightenment style bordering images. This choice creates an extension to the painting’s subject of descent into a world of animalistic passion from the naturalistic refined landscapes and hunting scenes around the edges and the Classical story of Diana and Actaeon. The centre frames breath a sense of medieval justice, with the hunter and his dogs being brutally executed for their mistreatment of the wild animals, which is satisfying when surrounded by a halo of refined hunting scenes and landscapes, making this painting unique in that it gives the impression it being a storyboard, with the centre images being a fierce, satisfying outcome to the lawful cruelty which has come before.
The painting is, upon first glance, Naturalistic in its style. This first impression of the style contrasts sharply with the painting’s unusual composition, and the final blow lands before with the centre two frame’s Surrealist content. Therefore, this painting is, when these opposing elements are pieced together, a notably unique piece of work quite unlike anything from the period I have seen before, which is why it has caught my eye and remained in my mind long after I first viewed it.
The aesthetic experience when viewing it, the showcasing of the beauty of nature in all its forms, and the barbarism of the anthropomorphised animals make this piece intriguing before one might even begin to pick apart what the allegory of this painting might be. Perhaps an early animal rights activist, perhaps trying to show how western civilisation has normalised their own cruelty by presenting a viewer with the two images of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ and asking them which is really which, perhaps he just thought it would be amusing to see the shoe on the other foot.
The exhibition ‘Dutch Masters’ at the Hermitage showcased 63 works by 50 Dutch artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It ran from 7 October 2017 - 27 May 2018. The works had previously been held by St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum and had been returned to Amsterdam for the exhibition for the first time in 250 as a brief appreciation of the artists and their works.
The Dutch Golden age is credited to the wealth acquired by Northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century which caused a boom in painting as materials became more accessible and demand rose as the affluent purchased and traded art. Several million paintings are thought to have been produced during the period. The paintings were, like Potter’s, widely very unique in style as artists experimented with style and content, which could also be accredited to the wealth of the country as individuals were more financially stable and thus able to take risks. Other pieces displayed in the exhibition included a range of equally interesting and animated paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Joachim Wtewael, Frans Hals, Gerard Dou and Willem Kalf.
Written by Rosie Day
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulus_Potter